News Articles

What to give the person who has everything? A clock that will keep perfect time  even after the heat-death of the universe. Such a "space-time crystal" has periodic structure in time as well as space. Why haven't we built those? With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.

The muscle-building dietary supplement creatine helps women battling depressions, according to a study from South Korea and the University of Utah. It reports that women with major depressive disorder (MDD) who augmented their daily antidepressant with 5 grams of creatine responded twice as fast and experienced remission of the illness at twice the rate of women who took the antidepressant alone.

Sharpless 2-292, a stellar nursery called the Seagull Nebula because it seems to form the head of the seagull, glows brightly due to the energetic radiation from a very hot young star lurking at its heart. Now it has gotten a new look courtesy of the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory.

Active video gaming using dancing and boxing were associated with increased heart rate, oxygen uptake and energy expenditure in a study of 18 school children in England, according to a report in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine.It sure beats rest and sedentary video game play, anyway.Low levels of physical activity have been linked to obesity. Active video game playing compared with traditional sedentary video game playing encourages more movement and could help children increase their physical activity levels, according to the study background.

New research may offer some hope to women whose fertility has been compromised by the side-effects of cancer therapy or by premature menopause.In a new study, researchers from Monash University and Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research found that two proteins, PUMA and NOXA, cause the death of egg cells in the ovaries. Blocking the activity of the proteins may lead to new strategies to protect women's fertility.They focused their studies on primordial follicle oocytes, egg cells which provide each woman's lifetime supply of eggs. Low numbers of these egg cells can also cause early menopause. 

Dentistry has been around for almost long as people have had teeth go bad but evidence for dentistry is another matter entirely. We don't pull off an arm when it is sore so the first human to figure out that pulling something attached to the skull would help keep people alive was taking nearly as big a chance as the first patient.Ancient evidence of prehistoric dentistry has been discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan and other findings in a Neolithic graveyard near Parma have detailed creative tooth work. An artificial tooth from the cemetery of Gebel Ramlah, Egypt, dates back 5,500 years.

Combat traits usually get most of the attention from researchers, because they are thought to have arisen due to intense male-male competition for access to females. Large, elaborate weapons become the focus of sexual selection studies because the connection is obvious. Collared lizards (Crotaphytus collaris), for example, have bite force correlated with head width, and it positively predicts the number of offspring produced in a breeding season, suggesting sexual selection on head morphology and the role of attacking traits.

Laboratory modified corn has shown some progress in treating a rare, life-threatening childhood genetic disease. Researchers have been developing enzyme therapeutics for lysosomal storage diseases - rare but devastating childhood genetic diseases – for more than a decade. In the most severe forms of these inherited diseases, untreated patients die in early childhood because of progressive damage to all organs of the body and currently, enzyme treatments are available for only six of the more than 70 diverse types of lysosomal storage diseases.

Doctors don't want to be general care physicians, they want to specialize, and it is a problem that will only get worse because it involves money.Primary care physicians are at the heart of health care in the United States, they are the first to diagnose patients and ensure those patients receive the care they need.  But faced with increased regulations, paperwork, the onslaught of defensive medicine, malpractice costs and staggering medical school bills, many are instead opting to become specialists.

Health Robotics today announced that it has entered the Blood/Plasma Automation Industry by leveraging its technology across the Pharmaceutical and Blood/Plasma industry sectors. They also announced the general availability of embedded Radio-frequency identification (RFID) for its Sterile Compounding Automation solutions i.v.STATION, i.v.SOFT, and i.v.STATION ONCO. These RFID upgrades will be showcased at the upcoming ASHP Midyear Meeting&Exhibition (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) on December 2-6 in Las Vegas. 

Humans of the Upper Palaeolithic Age recycled and repurposed their stone artifacts to be put to other uses, according to a group of anthropologists after examining burnt artifacts found in the Molí del Salt site in Tarragona, Spain.How could they make that determination? Finding that stone tools during prehistoric times were recycled is not going to be apparent in archaeological records.

Gravitational lensing has found MACS1149-JD1, which was created less than 500 million years after the Big Bang, making it the most remote galaxy ever to be observed. Our universe came into being approx. 13.7 billion years ago with a Big Bang. 400 to 500 million years later, conditions in the cosmos allowed for the formation of the first stars but it was believed there was almost no hope of ever receiving a signal from any object of this time period; if there already were galaxies back then, their brightness would be far weaker than the light of a candle on the moon.